The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor A world of princesses and magic may seem like an odd place for a 51-year-old man, but it's no surprise to find Alex McGilvery there. The Flin Flon pastor and avid writer recently released his self-published debut novel, The Unenchanted Princess. "It's a fairly broad range of story," says McGilvery. "Different age groups have read it and enjoyed it." Unfolding across 242 pages, The Unenchanted Princess is a coming-of-age tale following a beautiful young heroine by the name of Princess Alexandra. Alexandra is an anomaly in the land of magic into which she is born. Unlike the other characters, she does not have a fairy tale-style enchantment along the lines of Sleepy Beauty or Snow White. She is more embracing of her oddity than her worried parents, who scheme to either find her an enchantment or marry her off to a man willing to overlook her lack thereof. Struggle Alexandra flees, but soon learns she is at the heart of a struggle to control the magic lands. Together with the Frog Prince, a Prince Charming who is turned into a crow, and a young woman from a land where magic is forbidden, she must learn to defeat her enemy and dispell the last enchantment. Interestingly, the back story on the novel is just as compelling as its content. "This started as a Christmas present for my wife back in 1995," notes McGilvery. "I gave her a book, a chapter a month for a year. I wrote that and I wasn't finished yet, so I kept going. And then I put it away for a bit and realized that I had left two characters wandering off into the wilderness and hadn't told anything about what happened to them. So I went back and filled in their story, and I realized that it still wasn't finished." McGilvery would pick up his work in progress every few years, tweaking here and there. He wrapped up the last major version five years ago. Shortly before this past holiday season, 100 copies of The Unenchanted Princess hit the shelves courtesy of Lighthouse Publishers 2002, a small, Flin Flon-based self-publishing house. Given that McGilvery's day job is pastor at Northminster Memorial United Church, some readers may assume the Toronto native's novel is awash with religious overtones. But that's just not the first-time author's style. "I don't like writing stuff that's overtly religious because the story is the important thing, not the religious message or the moral," says McGilvery. "But that doesn't mean that there isn't a spiritual aspect, because [characters] have to figure out where their strength comes from, they have to grow, they have to struggle with themselves and with the people around them Ð with the world Ð to accomplish what they need to accomplish in life. And all of that has implications for a spiritual life." If there is a moral to The Unenchanted Princess, McGilvery says it's about being true to yourself. "The thing that the characters do, or are learning to do, is just to be themselves," he says, "and to figure out what they are offering rather than depending on outside forces to tell them who they are or what they should do or how they should act." Bound and published If there is a moral to McGilvery launching his first book in middle age, it is that writers should never back down from the dream of having their work bound and published. "I have always written stories, since I was a kid," he says. "I actually have copies of very bad novels that I wrote as a kid. I still have copies of these really, really rather clichd, horrible stories. I never throw anything out because you never know when there's some little kernel of something that will be useful to a different story." Countless commercial authors began writing as children. Some even started out in the realm of self-publishing before landing their big break with a major publisher. But McGilvery does not necessarily expect to follow that same path. "If somebody runs up and offers me a book contract, I won't say no," he says. "[But] part of it is that in order to be published by even a small press, you have to tailor the book to their market. So you have to be able to pigeonhole it Ð 'this is young adult' or 'this is fantasy' or 'this is thriller.' And the stories I write don't pigeonhole easily. They may involve children as being characters, but there may be really adult themes that are woven through there." Whatever becomes of McGilvery's future works Ð and there are sure to be many Ð the most important thing for him is to provide an outlet for the ideas bouncing around in his head. "Some of the times the stories just need to be written and they demand that I put them down on paper," he says. "They're not too fussy about whether I spent a lot of time editing. They want to be out and written down and organized. And that's as much fun as reading a good book. Sometimes it's more fun than reading a good book because it's not as predictable."
